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Thursday, August 22, 2013

As you know, I like to mock the misbegotten strain of political activism known as "Birtherism" every chance I get on this site. The movement, which holds as its guiding principle that Barack Obama's presidency is built on an elaborate edifice of fraudulent documents and a conspiracy spanning several decades, is the very definition of cognitive dissonance, with neither common sense nor irrefutable proof enough to squelch the (ultimately racist) notion that Obama is legally unfit to hold office.

That these folks still have oxygen this many years later is hilarious enough, but it's made even more so by Tea Party darling Ted Cruz, the crackpot Texas senator who's clearly angling for a 2016 run, and who now has to combat a bit of Birtherism himself due to his Canadian birth (and thus Canadian dual citizenship). Now, just to be clear, Cruz is an American citizen and is totally eligible to run, but as Steven Lubet at Salon explains, thanks to the kind of nonsense he himself has encouraged, Cruz is now caught in a political trap of his own making. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.